Day 149

It’s amazing how much you miss certain things when you don’t have access to them. A number of people were talking the other day about how much they missed music. In fact, there was an impromptu sing-a-long that erupted among the group. It was a joyous moment; people’s voices joining together in song.

Then the moment turned sour. While we were singing a song that I was sure everyone would know we all forgot the words. It was like a switch turned off in our minds and we just forgot what it was that we were doing.

I want to believe that the arts are going to live beyond the Apocalypse but the case may be that they will not. Think of all of the works of art, just hanging in museums and galleries with no one to appreciate them. The songs that will no longer be heard. The books that will no longer be read. It’s a depressing thought if you think on it too long… Art is an expression of a culture’s creativity and at the moment, we are so busy trying to survive that we have no time to be creative. I would like to think the world will be able to get back to that but I do believe that the chances of that happening are slim to none. I hope I’m wrong; I hope that people need to create in order to understand, to process, to heal. I think it would be good for us, for all of us.

Life with Marcus in charge hasn’t actually been all that bad. Despite the way in which he came to power and the deaths that had to occur for it to happen, he has been a good thing for the settlement. He has taken on the task of patching all of the gaps in the wall. It’s freed up a lot of time for the Perimeter Guards to do other tasks that needed to be done. Now all we do it patrol the perimeter just in case the patches don’t hold.

Having the gaps patched up has actually prevented the Undead from hanging around the wall too much. Of course, we get the odd group that passes by but without an entrance they don’t bother too much with us and move along.

With Marcus, everyone has a say. It’s not a true democracy, that’s plainly obvious but he at least listens to what you have to say and then weighs the pros and cons before making a decision. With Johanna and the Council, it was a dictatorship pure and simple. Whatever Johanna wanted to put into law, she did and the Council never stopped her. I can’t fault the woman completely however; she did protect the city of Seattle from the Undead with her plan.

In the days following the riot, coup d’état, whatever you want to call it, Marcus officially apologized for the atrocities that were committed. While it’s interesting to see that he has a heart and I don’t believe that he genuinely feels bad about what happened. No one dares to speak out against him. What’s done is done and people are choosing to let sleeping dogs lie.

Even though he has apologized, people still feel the threat of violence that hides just beneath the surface. It’s an eerie feeling to be completely honest, like you’re never able to get comfortable. Like a pair of eyes are always on you at every moment.

We live with a number of restrictions as well. There is a curfew and you’re only allowed out after dark if you have special permission. If you’re caught out once the sun goes down and you have no proof that you’re allowed to be there, you spend an obligatory week in jail.

I’m not sure what it is that Marcus is worried about. No one is going to try to usurp his new role. I mean there might be a few people that want him gone, but there are no plans to make that happen. At least none that I know of anyways.

The worst of the restrictions might be that we are now only allowed to have one hour per week on the communal computers. And I have seen that our laptop has been put into circulation there. It’s hard to only have contact once per week as I know that some of you are out there thinking that something awful has happened. Well it has, but somehow we always manage to pull through it and survive.

The worst thing is that internet is beginning to die. That’s that only way that I can explain it. There seems to be a systematic shutting down of sites and well I can’t really fault that it‘s happening. At some point, we all knew that it was bound to happen. With no one to run the power stations, the servers would eventually go down. And we’ve been experiencing sites going missing all along but now it just seems that the internet is getting smaller. The once infinite space for information and the like is imploding; folding in on itself and swallowing the information that it once readily provided for us.

The funny thing is that porn sites are still very much alive. And I don’t mean alive in the sense that there is new content or anything. I just mean that the servers were still active and streaming content for the people that had either paid for it, or were willing to pay for it. I saw it a lot at the communal computer bank. The fact that it was the only thing left on the internet to really see meant that everyone was going to go there. And it wasn’t about the sex; it was the fact that they were the only images left to see of a world before all of this.

At some point, those sites will die as well. Lost to the world forever. Some of you might wonder if we will miss them. The truth is we will miss it all. Everything that we lose will be a painful reminder of the world that we once lived in.